The Narrative Production of Stakeholder Engagement Processes

Narrative as Talk: Framing and Storytelling

Rich traditions of planning and public policy scholarship and professional training draw attention to narratives in the forms of talk and other communicative acts—messaging, framing, and storytelling—that shape issues, interpret actions, convey feelings, and imagine future planning and policy outcomes. For example, practitioners are exhorted to use different tools to construct a congruent narrative message of their policy or plan (Guhathakurta 2002) and to promote their ideas by “devis[ing] plans (stories about the future) that are designed to persuade the audiences that most matter to them” (Throgmorton 2003, 127).

Competing narratives are a standard feature of planning and public policy. Different versions of the issues and impact of a proposed plan or policy change vie to plot and legitimate possible future courses of action (Mandelbaum 1991), to provide a view of how to interpret a situation and what must be done about it (Fischer 2003), and to assert the proper rationale for different courses of action (Scott 2008). These narratives make some policy arguments and issues more salient or palatable than others to decision makers or the public (Roe 1994). Their framing power is substantial; Gunder (2006, 208), for example, has demonstrated how the broader umbrella of “sustainability” has been “deployed under a narrative of sustainable development,” a framing that directs and confines possibilities. Recognizing the influence of these overarching narratives, participants in policy-making coalitions intentionally co-construct narratives that enable them to work together (Schön and Rein 1995) or create new arenas for exploring and deciding policy (Hajer 2003).

Imaginative narratives also facilitate planning and policy imagination as part of the process of trying on and constructing workable connections between policy options and the outcomes planners and other public managers desire (Stone 1989). For example, Abolafia (2010) describes the governors of the Federal Reserve Board “plotting” various policy options to construct an “operating model” to infer how a policy might be justified and designed. They collectively built stories to try out sequences of actions and logics to connect them, which allowed them to lay out and enact a set of policy-making and implementation steps.

Storytelling forms of narrative work also shape the future of community planning processes and outcomes. Storytelling is persuasive and constitutive of planning outcomes (Throgmorton 1996; Flyvbjerg 1998). Planners share and interpret stories about their work with one another, and this storytelling identifies new issues, frames agendas, shapes reputations, and helps realize practical judgment about how to proceed (Forester 1999, 3). Planners are encouraged to use storytelling in public deliberations to help participants establish a framework for coordinating action about what can and should be done and how (Healey 1992) and to minimize emotional/subjective and rational/objective dichotomization of ways of knowing in political decision making (Hoch 2006). Storytelling provides fuel for the imagination of possibilities, structure to processes, and justification and critique of the performance of policy making and planning (Sandercock 2003). Polletta and Lee (2006) observe that stories enhance participants’ expression of their preferences, encourage empathy, and support groups reaching understandings and agreements. Storytelling helps people to articulate desired choices and their consequences and justification.

Narrative as Enactment: The Narrative Construction of Processes

Enactment forms of narrative work have been less frequently explored in scholarship on policy making and planning. Bruner’s (1991) highly cited theory of the “narrative construction of reality” is the best recognized articulation of this view; he characterizes narration as a means of making sense of and going along in the world, accomplished through assembling actions into narrative chains through which we orient, organize, and interpret their unfolding. The relevance of the narrative construction of reality for planning theory and practice is that planning processes can be reconceptualized as constituted through narrative work that includes enactment, talk, and interpretation.

Master narratives are central in Bruner’s (1991) theories of narrative as enactment. In Bruner’s terms, a master narrative refers to the construction of a process, chain of events, or logic to guide action from one step to another in an unfolding narrative. It is a schema available for adaption and use. (Note that this connotes something different from “competing narratives” described above, which refer to framing moves designed to persuade people to interpret actions and possibilities in a particular way.) “Buying groceries” is an example of a master narrative. As we shall see in the case described below, a particular engagement effort can be understood as an enactment of master narratives about what constitutes a “participatory process” in planning.

Narrative logics, which connect one action and the next into a narrative with flow and causality, also help to produce engagement processes. Narratives do not simply exist a priori to be enacted (i.e., switching from brick-and-mortar to online shopping is still buying groceries). Narratives and narrative logics are also produced by the participants in real time during the course of action (Czarniawska 1997; Pentland and Feldman 2007). The relationship between actions and narratives is recursive, involving a narrative logic that knits one step into the next and into an overall narrative.

Getting Stuck

As plans for the medical center were under discussion, Belknap’s residents and neighborhood organizations consistently asserted that they would welcome development but wanted to be part of managing its direction. Recent experience poised them to play such a role. Beginning around 2000, neighborhood organizers had begun mobilizing to be included in decisions about what happens in Belknap, partly in response to a history of having been left out of previous policy-making processes. In the 1960s, the neighborhood was bisected by a new interstate highway, had a new hospital displace its once-thriving commercial district, and lost blocks of housing for a planned school that was never built. Soon after, however, several collective triumphs—including alleviating drug dealing in the park, locating a lost child, and preserving the neighborhood school—boosted residents’ sense of community cohesion and political efficacy. Not long before the planning effort studied here, residents had been among the most enthusiastic participants in two citywide planning efforts (Quick and Feldman 2011, 2014) and in creating a transportation access plan for Belknap. Residents whom I interviewed proudly identified “passionate people,” “participation,” “activism,” or “our sense of community” as among Belknap’s greatest assets. Elected officials, city employees, and staff of citywide community organizations, businesses, and foundations also pointed to Belknap as one of the city’s most politically engaged neighborhoods.

Therefore, as residents grew concerned about gentrification pressures, they became interested in using a participatory planning process to establish goals and guidelines for development in their neighborhood. City planning staff agreed it was important to have a plan, developed with lots of neighborhood involvement, to manage redevelopment of Belknap. Unfortunately, they felt the city did not have sufficient funding or staff to sponsor a plan. Things came to a head in early 2008 when a group of three investors requested approval for several small-scale projects in Belknap. City officials and residents suddenly realized that the three investors had collectively acquired the equivalent of six blocks of property in the neighborhood. This both affirmed the need for a plan and suggested an opportunity to create one. The city planners informed the developers that because their city does not make planning decisions without public involvement, they would not consider the proposals until the developers created an Area Specific Plan through a “participatory process with the neighborhood.” The developers agreed to hire a consultant to facilitate the effort, to pay for the process, and to have it be overseen by a steering committee that the developers and the Belknap neighborhood council would assemble.

When they charged the developers to undertake a “participatory process,” the city planners did not specify what that meant. They also did not clarify whether the steering committee, city planning department and commission, or developers had responsibility and authority to decide how to respond to public input. My analysis of meeting minutes, media coverage, and research interviews uncovered no evidence of a discussion of what steps or qualities would be involved in implementing the planning process to ensure that it was participatory. Instead, there was an assumption that there was a strong and shared understanding about what a “participatory process” involved. The developers relied on their consultant to know what that meant, and the city planning staff and commission relied on the city’s extensive previous experience with and a growing reputation for participatory planning (Quick and Feldman 2011).

The developers and neighborhood council agreed to hold six open community meetings in the neighborhood about the plan, sequenced to involve participants in increasingly fine-grained decision making about the land-use plan for the neighborhood. The meeting was open to anyone interested, though outreach was clearly oriented toward Belknap residents. The organizers posted notices around the neighborhood about the meetings. Over 100 people participated in at least one of the first five meetings. At each meeting, the developers’ consultant shared revised and increasingly detailed plans that incorporated the feedback they had received. The consultants and developers believed that they were implementing a good participatory process because of the large turnout, high levels of transparency about the process, and responsiveness to input.

However, my research interviews reveal that at the same time, residents and neighborhood organizers had reservations about the legitimacy of a participatory process sponsored by developers seeking to profit from the plan and facilitated by the developers’ consultant. Their concerns mounted at a community meeting about priorities and preferences for Belknap’s development. The developers strategically distributed their employees, relatives, and other supporters across breakout discussion groups. Participants were told to use a limited number of dots to indicate their favorite locations for high-density housing development. Many were incensed by how this played out, which they interpreted as a subversion of the democratic process akin to stuffing a ballot box. A community organizer later described it to me:

What happened was the developers got all of their people together and distributed them around the tables. There were arguments over who held the dots. It was a flawed process from that point on. Instead of actually engaging and listening, it was more, “I yelled the loudest, so this is what we’re going to do.”

However, for a long time, people held these concerns in private. I asked repeatedly whether anyone had voiced their concerns publicly or approached the city, developers, or steering committee about reshaping the process and was told these concerns had not been expressed. When I asked why, study participants explained they had decided to wait and see what would happen or felt that they were satisfied with the shape the neighborhood plan was taking and therefore felt it was not important to challenge the process. The developers and their consultant were not aware of how badly they had offended some residents. They arrived for the sixth meeting with a final draft plan, and they and the steering committee members were confident that the neighborhood would express strong support and encourage them to take it to the planning commission for approval. Instead, the process fell apart. A resident who was participating for the first time that evening vehemently protested that the process had not been sufficiently advertised and had not been inclusive of diverse populations in the neighborhood, particularly nonwhite residents and residents of a subsidized housing complex. A chorus of newcomers accompanying her echoed her views. The developers and consultant tried to defend the level of involvement they had observed, but none of the other steering committee members or regular participants in the previous five meetings stood up to defend the process. Several people yelled personal and obscene insults at each other. New and returning participants voiced suspicions that “developers” and “the city” could not be trusted. Alarmed, the developers and consultant left hastily through a back door. Interviewed afterward about what they called “the screaming meeting,” residents were not surprised about the concerns that were expressed but were surprised about “how bad” the interactions had been.

In the following weeks, the conflict became even more acute. Plans for the neighborhood were the subject of lots of discussion as neighbors encountered each other or the developer on their block and in the local school and parks. Police were called out several times to intervene in sidewalk disputes over the planning process and plan outcomes. People began accusing each other of behaving irrationally, undemocratically, or malevolently. Nasty debate erupted in online forums hosted by the local newspaper. Some writers freely painted opponents of the planning process as “anti-development,” while many of those being classified as anti-development insisted that they accepted development but wanted a legitimately democratic decision-making process.

Analysis: Seeing the Work of Master Narratives in Belknap

This beginning phase of the neighborhood process points to the importance of master narratives as a form of narrative work in public engagement. Specifically, it points to how people use implicit master narratives to produce engagement: to plan, orient themselves to, and evaluate the quality of participatory processes. Paying attention to master narratives generates fruitful insights into how confusion, dissatisfaction, and distrust arose in Belknap. Observing master narratives does not provide a unique, totalizing, or definitive explanation of why the process unrolled as it did. However, it does provide a compelling interpretation: when competing implicit narratives of a “participatory process” were not publicly aired and negotiated, people could not see and negotiate the differences among their imagined paths of action, and the mismatched narratives contributed to the dissonance and conflict they experienced. Frequently, planners are advised to provide a clear and explicit road map to the decision-making process to reference before launching the effort and as it proceeds. Using a lens of narrative work does not change the essence of that very sound advice. Instead, it recasts it as a form of narrative work in which a master narrative of the participatory process is made explicit and calls attention to the fact that there may be multiple implicit narratives to be sorted out.

Master narratives may be referenced as if there is a taken-for-granted way of enacting them, but they are not formulaic or deterministic. Rather, they are schema for interpreting and enacting particular instances of commonly recognized themes or patterns, such that events are constituted “in light of” a master narrative, and the narrative is reconstructed through each enactment (Bruner 1991, 7–8). The narrative of “being in love,” for example, might be implemented in any number of ways depending on circumstances, and over time, collective cultural and individual narratives of what constitutes “being in love” might change based upon how being in love is being enacted (Swidler 2001). Often narratives are implicit and uncontested, but sometimes they are negotiated explicitly as different “operating models” for explaining and guiding action (Abolafia 2010). Individuals can connect the same events quite differently according to the logics of their particular narratives (Pentland and Feldman 2007).

Looking for master narratives in Belknap reveals several dynamics. No one stated what a “participatory process” would involve, and thus, multiple versions of that master narrative were in play. For the developers and consultant, transparency, good turnout, and responsiveness were critical. For the newcomers at the final meeting, inclusiveness and representativeness of different groups and parts of the neighborhood were critical. For the people who had been privately doubting for some time whether the process was participatory by their definition, shared ownership and a lack of bias were critical. These different actors were using master narratives to faithfully enact their respective versions of public engagement and to judge what happened. It is commonplace and not necessarily problematic for multiple versions of any master narrative to be operating at one time (Swidler 2001). Sometimes, organizers willfully co-opt a narrative of a “participatory process” to legitimate efforts that are actually tokenistic or intentionally manipulative (Arnstein 1969). These “participatory processes” may be disingenuous window dressing for decisions that have already been reached in a nonparticipatory manner (Flyvbjerg 1998).

In Belknap, however, the data indicate that the misalignment of master narratives contributed to disruption. My interpretation of the accounts of diverse participants during dozens of confidential interviews is that the conflict ensued less from ill intent and intentional abuse of participation than from unresolved, divergent interpretations of the master narratives about how a “participatory process” should be enacted. Parsing out the different operating versions of a master narrative makes legible how they enable different courses of action and judgments about what is a legitimate approach. When people encountered others deviating from their own version of the narrative, they interpreted the other people as behaving irrationally, illegitimately, or with ill intent. The competing versions were at the heart of the legitimacy crisis over whether the Belknap effort could or could not be justifiably described as a “participatory process.”

A specific example is the developers’ strategically distributing employees, relatives, and other supporters across the breakout groups for the dot voting exercise. The developers’ narrative of a participatory process was that policy outcomes depend upon individuals’ bringing their interests to the table and having their input counted. Consequently, their team recruited a large number of advocates, placed a representative in each group to try to persuade others to its position, and recorded its preferences with as many dot votes as possible. Since some of the developers lived in the neighborhood with their families, and no limits had been set on who could participate, the developers considered this legitimate. They presumed that other stakeholders were doing the same and felt their own goals for development would be left behind if they did not maximize their input. Their operating version of a “participatory process” in this setting resembles a “winners-take-all,” competitive version of interest politics. In contrast, the people incensed by the developers’ actions interpreted them as a subversion of the democratic process akin to illicitly stuffing a ballot box. The offended parties’ version of the narrative was based in part on their previous experiences in the city, in which participants exchanged views and developed new perspectives through deliberation. Thus, they regarded dot voting as fodder for further dialogue, not a decisive result.

The example of Belknap implies that publicly airing and negotiating among different versions of a “participatory process” might have avoided some of the conflict and disruption. However, the multiple competing versions were not visible until the process was well under way, at the sixth community meeting. At that point, without a commonly accessible and legitimate narrative, the various parties could not figure out what their map was for moving forward. Indeed, in the next phase of this chronology, the parties created an explicit, publicly accessible narrative of what a “participatory process” would involve.

Getting Unstuck

After a few weeks of heated conflict following the sixth neighborhood meeting, a group of interested neighborhood residents created a new group to try to restart the process in a neutral forum. Lacking the legitimacy of a sponsoring organization and support from people skilled in land-use planning or process facilitation, they did not gain much traction. A few months later, when the deadline the planning commission had set for producing the plan arrived, the various parties briefly roused themselves for a public hearing where they argued vociferously about whether the processes for creating the draft and alternative plans had been legitimate. At the planning commission meeting, the commissioners tabled action on the plan and urged all parties to keep trying to work things out together.

They did not keep trying, however. Instead, the developers, city staff, and residents stopped participating in any kind of public discussion and retreated to lick their wounds privately. In research interviews, they explained that they wanted to protect themselves from being misunderstood or attacked and, furthermore, that they were not taking action because they were deeply confused about what to do next. The developers felt blindsided and maligned for their good intentions and effort. Residents and city planners were pained and confused that Belknap, despite its proud history of having very engaged residents who work on problems together, could suddenly experience such dysfunctional community meetings and have people be so alienated from one another.

Everyone had believed they knew how to have a participatory process and work together. When that expectation was not realized, they understood they would have to actively forge a path forward. They used confidential conversations with me to speculate about various ways to move forward. The pathways they speculated about included continuing the initial process with some kind of remedy, starting over, or completely dropping efforts to create a neighborhood plan. However, they were not confident that any of them would necessarily work and feared they would be reproached for even suggesting them. The planning director stated most succinctly what many others had expressed in interviews when she said, “I can’t see anything I can do. Every option seems like a losing proposition.” The community was stuck.

Finally, 10 months after the explosive community meeting, the developers made a move that helped things become unstuck. They felt hamstrung by having no neighborhood plan within which to act. They owned property they could not develop and had spent months and thousands of dollars on a neighborhood planning process that had not produced a plan on which they could act. So, to shake things loose, they deliberately did something provocative. They submitted an application to the city to demolish several houses and replace them with small apartment buildings. Alarmed, neighborhood organizers, the planning staff, and the planning commissioners were reenergized to attempt a participatory process to complete the plan.

The planning director called a meeting of the planning commissioners, the developers, neighborhood advocates, and city legal staff to discuss how to handle the developers’ proposal. She chose to have the discussion as part of a working session of the planning commission, so that it was transparent and open to anyone interested but not a venue for making decisions on the merits of the property development application. She recommended staging formal decision making about the proposed project and neighborhood plan in two parts: first a discussion of whether an exception could be made to the policy that projects be reviewed in the context of an adopted neighborhood plan and then, only if that was approved, a discussion of the developers’ specific project application.

During the discussion, which I observed and recorded, the participants played with several options for moving forward. As they experimented with, modified, and evaluated the possibilities, everyone spoke consistently in terms of what would best serve the community at large and move them beyond the impasse. Notably, as the whole group brainstormed, the developers discouraged a few options that might have been shortcuts to approve their projects more quickly. The developers explained that they rejected those options because they might compromise the legitimacy of a “participatory process.” Everyone avoided discussing the merits of the specific project (the proposal to demolish houses to build apartment buildings); instead, they repeatedly affirmed a need for an overall neighborhood plan and focused on the procedural question about how to create one. After some deliberation, they unanimously agreed to the two-stage process the planning director had proposed: they agreed to delay action on any specific proposals until the overall plan was completed.

Following that dialogue, neighborhood council members and other leaders in Belknap felt urgency to resume the planning process. Yet, they also felt they needed a new structure that would be considered more legitimate. They did not want to use the developers’ funding, feeling it could taint the legitimacy of the process, nor did the developers want to contribute more money. A neighborhood leader and a planning staff member did two things. First, they contacted a local foundation that had helped fund engagement efforts in the past to ask for facilitation support, which the foundation provided. The neighborhood organizers and planner believed that an external facilitator would help the parties adopt and implement a good process to complete the neighborhood plan and, furthermore, that the foundation was a trusted, neutral party that was well placed to sponsor someone who could work with all sides to find solutions. Second, they worked with the neighborhood council to reformulate the steering committee to retain representation from the developers and neighborhood but expand it to include more diverse representation of renters and homeowners from different income groups.

At the subsequent public hearing, the people who had plotted the two-stage process together followed that pathway, but with some new elements and the inclusion of many additional people who turned up for the hearing. The planning commissioners and staff began the meeting by explaining how and why the rezoning request was being broken into two stages. The commission also proposed a more deliberative approach to decision making than the typical public-hearing format. Specifically, the chair proposed that instead of a long line of speakers who would each be allotted a few minutes to make their point as forcefully as possible, they have a few representatives of the major viewpoints speak at greater length, in dialogue with the commission and one another, to try to formulate some mutually agreeable outcomes. On the basis of previous commission hearings, the meeting where key players had plotted how to proceed, and what he knew of people’s reputations in the community, the chair had ideas about who would be trusted and articulate spokespeople for each side. He suggested those names to the audience. Hearing many murmurs of agreement and no objections, the hearing started.

A resident who had led the effort to renew the participatory process began by assuring the commissioners that there was “now a place and a space” for a “civil conversation” and a commitment to “building consensus” as an alternative to “duking things out.” He pointed to reenergized commitment from all parties, the community foundation’s support to provide an independent facilitator who would reset the legitimacy of the process and guide the group’s progress, and the more diverse steering committee. Notably, the steering committee included a member of the developers’ team, who lived in the neighborhood, whom residents respected, and who served as the spokesperson for the developers during the hearing. In his testimony, he observed that the developers had willingly agreed to and funded a neighborhood planning process. He then recommended that the process be resumed and brought to a satisfying closure rather than abandoned. The commissioners gave several other people an opportunity to speak, played with a few options, asked for reactions, and repeatedly affirmed their commitment to a participatory process.

The commissioners’ decision was consistent with what the working session had implied: they determined that specific projects could not be considered outside the context of a neighborhood planning process and delayed the project proposal hearing to allow the neighborhood plan to be completed. In addition, they articulated, as they had not originally, some details about what they meant by a “participatory process with the neighborhood.” This time, they specified the importance of neighborhood “ownership” of the plan, they endorsed having a steering committee that would be independent of developer sponsorship and be composed of people with diverse perspectives, and they directed the disputing parties to work together to try to “agree with each other” about the planning outcomes that they could mutually endorse. They also warned the parties that after five months, they would act on the developers’ proposal—with or without a plan—explaining that they wanted to be fair to the developers and both “force the hand” and “give a chance” to the planning process.

The developers’ team seemed to accept that this was what everyone had agreed upon at the working session. They stated for the record that they were disappointed that their development proposals were being delayed yet again after considerable expense and effort on their part to have a good process with the neighborhood, but they did not try to change the commissioners’ minds. Belknap residents and city staff, in contrast, were ebullient about the decision when they gathered with each other right after the meeting and when they spoke with me privately afterward. They expressed relief that, as a neighborhood organizer put it, “we can stop asking ourselves over and over, ‘Do we have to start all over again?’” and that there were few remaining “complications” to work out about their next steps. They acknowledged that the deadline was challenging but also felt it was fair and a useful impetus to get them back to work. They had gotten unstuck.

Analysis: Seeing the Work of Narrative Logics in Belknap

This interim phase of the neighborhood process illuminates the work of narrative logics. Specifically, it suggests how narrative logics guide action, enable the next steps, and provide momentum and cohesion in a process. Logic in this context is not the same thing as valid reasoning used in argumentation. Narratives embed logics that enable people to know what to do next (Bruner 1991) in a recursive process in which flow and causality are constructed along the way (Pentland and Feldman 2007). Paying attention to narrative logics generates fruitful insights both about how action stalled and about how it resumed. It does not provide a unique and exclusive explanation of what happened, but the difference in momentum between the moments when people could—and could not—find a narrative logic is striking, suggesting that paying attention to this type of narrative work provides fruitful insight. Moreover, by doing the plotting inclusively, they created a way for the disputing parties to collaborate on creating a way forward and made the process accessible to newcomers.

The work of narrative logics in this case implies that when participants are disputing, co-producing a narrative logic for the process may help them to reengage. This will be familiar to mediators and scholars of dispute resolution, who often engage the parties in designing the ground rules and a rough plan of action as a foundation for moving into negotiation that is contentious over content. Using a lens of narrative work makes visible that cocreating ground rules is not only a soft, easy way to begin building agreement but also a vital step in creating the logic that is necessary to produce any coordinated action. Similar arguments could be made about other kinds of engagement and collaborative processes.

Ruptures in the master narratives under which people have been operating rob them of the logic that has been guiding their action. These interruptions can be generative, enabling change through the “positive effects of questioning received ideas” (Czarniawska 1997, 96). One of the ways to address these ruptures is through conversing to negotiate and construct logics for how to proceed. The narrative logics are not merely logistical but also persuasive, and multiple versions of “what if we try this” may be tested to plot, compel, and legitimate particular courses of action (Mandelbaum 1991). Abolafia (2010, 349) defines plotting as the “preceding constitutive process” of constructing a plausible narrative to justify and guide action. As with master narratives, however, plotting does not predetermine action. Instead, plotting a shared narrative of collective action builds trust and identity among multiple players and serves as an enabling resource, rather than a formula, for complex, coordinated actions that are both planned and improvised (Quinn and Worline 2008).

From this perspective, the long stall of the neighborhood plan, when people stopped trying to work together and did not know what to do, can be reinterpreted not merely as burnout but as a lack of a narrative logic to guide subsequent steps in a cohesive narrative. They got back on track through a particular form of narrative work: plotting inclusively to create a shared narrative logic. This occurred multiple times, including in the working meeting where the parties decided on the two-step process to handle the developers’ project request, during the public meeting when the chair of the planning commission proposed a more deliberative alternative to the traditional hearing, and when commissioners deliberated about several possible paths to direct the neighborhood to take. The elation many felt after the hearing speaks to the work that narrative logic does. Once the hearing clarified the expectations for neighborhood participation, the next steps, and a deadline, the residents were no longer burdened by continuing “complications” about how to proceed or the prospect of having to start over.

I characterize the participants’ narrative work as plotting inclusively to create a shared narrative logic. Whereas participation often involves just gathering input from stakeholders on a proposed policy decision, inclusion involves diverse stakeholders in co-producing the process for democratic decision making as well as the policy outcomes (Quick and Feldman 2011). To get the process back on track, the parties intentionally avoided negotiating about decision-making outcomes regarding the developers’ proposal until they had negotiated the process for decision making. Plotting in this inclusive way helped to bring cohesion and momentum to Belknap’s neighborhood planning process in several ways. In part, an inclusively generated and blessed plan addressed the problem that the environment had become so acrimonious that it was a “losing proposition” for any individual to step out alone. Co-producing a way out of the impasse created resources to support ongoing negotiation. For example, the developers’ balking at scenarios that might have expedited their project approval, but hampered the legitimacy of the process as a whole, generated resources in the form of trust and commitment to collaborative problem solving.

“Cottage Retail” and “Plan 3.0”

The reconstituted neighborhood plan steering committee met repeatedly in the months following the planning commission hearing. The new facilitator helped them to sort out how they did, and did not, want to conduct their work. After deliberating about the options, with the help of his clarifying questions and skill in engagement process design and techniques, the committee members realized they wanted to avoid what one steering committee participant described as the “dot voting meetings” that the developers’ consultant had convened because they seemed to polarize people. Instead, they did a lot of work within their own small committee, since they represented the major stakeholders and the points of difference that needed to be resolved. With the facilitator’s help, they implemented a strategy to reach others in the community through small group meetings, outreach at community events, and one-to-one meetings with key stakeholders to gather their input. Thus, the facilitator helped to create a functioning narrative guide for their particular “participatory process” by leading them to articulate their goals and preferences and by translating those into an explicit road map of the participatory methods they would use and the sequence of steps they would take.

The community made progress on many aspects of the plan but remained divided about whether to allow commercial development on the edge of the neighborhood closest to the growing medical center. Steering committee members repeatedly stressed the need to get a plan passed and urged compromise. Just a few days before the deadline set by the planning commission, a provocative question allowed the disputing sides to imagine new options. A steering committee member later recounted,

The facilitator said to people who were more opposed to mixed-use stuff, “Is there any way you could see mixed use happening in a residential-style building type?” “‘I guess if it looked like a house, it might be okay.” So, he asks the developer, “Is it hard to create a commercial-style business in a building that might look like a residence?” “I guess we could work with that.” Out of that came a special land-use classification called “cottage retail.” We were able to compromise on that corner, which we hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface on the first time around. A little-better-structured process, including the right people facilitating the conversation, led to finding common ground nobody foresaw.

Just as the committee had reached a point of being ready to accept unexpected solutions in order to get a plan passed, the city’s planning staff were eager to have an approved plan despite some reservations about the completeness of what the neighbors proposed. One of the ways that the steering committee inspired confidence in the plan was by describing what they were producing as “Plan 3.0.” They did this to signal that they were building on the initial effort sponsored by the developers and an alternative plan that some Belknap residents had started. They also made an analogy to Web 2.0—a term used to describe Internet sites that allow users to iteratively and interactively generate content—to signal that they were creating not a fully complete product but rather a platform for ongoing collaboration to interpret and implement the plan. The full steering committee turned out to show its support for Plan 3.0 at the planning commission hearing. A year had passed since the commissioners had tabled the plan and urged the neighborhood to “keep trying.” This time, the commissioners praised the plan and unanimously approved opening an official 30-day public comment period.

Making good on their promise to move the developers’ proposals forward as soon as the neighborhood plan was in place, at their very next meeting the commissioners considered the developers’ long-delayed application to demolish a few buildings and build apartments. They rejected it as a poorly designed and conceived project. Remarkably, the developers neither protested the project decision nor tried to hold up approval of the neighborhood plan. During the comment period on the plan, no additional input was provided; study participants’ explanation for this was that so much input had already been thoughtfully considered that they did not feel a need to revisit or raise topics for consideration at that point. Thus, at the end of the comment period, the planning commission unanimously approved it. The city council immediately approved the plan, which is now being implemented.

Analysis: Seeing the Work of Storytelling in Belknap

Reviewing the final stages of Belknap’s planning process through the lens of narrative work reveals the contribution of storytelling to production of the process as well as the final plan. Through storytelling, the participants represented their perspectives and views, used metaphors to constitute new ways of working together, generated novel ideas about land-use planning in the neighborhood, and reinterpreted the work they were doing. Significantly, group storytelling to play with and create new ideas about actions and outcomes not only helped the parties to resume the neighborhood planning process but also helped them to overcome a critical bottleneck—a persistent dispute over the plan’s final content. Like plotting, creative group storytelling about desired and possible futures is a form of narrative work through which possibilities for action are created by imagining endpoints or pathways to them. Storytelling about a particular outcome or pathway is not enough to make it occur but can facilitate its occurrence if those listening both “supply and accept” the story (Feldman and Sköldberg 2002, 287). As discussed in the introduction to this paper, planning scholars have previously argued that storytelling is persuasive and constitutive of planning outcomes (Throgmorton 1996), may stimulate “a new imagination of alternatives” (Sandercock 2003, 18), and can facilitate the transformative community changes that are needed to realize desired futures (Healey 1992).

Indeed, creative group storytelling does seem to have these predicted effects in Belknap. Storytelling to imagine new planning processes and decisions helped to transform old patterns and construct the path toward a desired future. For example, the neighborhood organizer’s assertion that there was now “a place and a space” for “building consensus” instead of “duking things out” was an invitation not only to the planning commission to endorse the renewed planning process but also to potential participants to accept and enact the actions needed to bring the story to life. Resolving the thorniest dispute about the content of the plan—relating to where commercial land uses could be permitted—also involved creative group storytelling. Talk of a “cottage retail” category for land use that would look like housing but function as a business created a new alternative that allowed the parties to move beyond entrenched positions.

Similarly, by recasting the “big gym dot voting meetings” and other detested features of the initial phases of planning as Plan 1.0, the steering committee renarrated the past as a story of ongoing learning and a foundation for continuing progress rather than of failure. The stunning outcome of the first proposal reviewed under the provisionally accepted plan—a rejection of the developers’ long-delayed project and the developers’ acceptance of that decision and of the plan—suggests that hopes had been well placed that Plan 3.0 would be a foundation for an ongoing process of deliberation that would support substantively rational decisions.